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New Avatar Featurette Online

Cameron et al on film & game links

Here's a bit of excitement for a Thursday afternoon: a new featurette about the Avatar game from Ubisoft, with writer/director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau contributing at some length to the thinking behind the game and the movie. You can watch the full video below, with all its rather lovely footage of Pandora, but for those of you at work or in really, really quiet libraries, here are the important bits.

Says producer Jon Landau, "Avatar is an epic adventure fantasy set on the world of Pandora. Our hope is that through other mediums the fanbase get to explore the world of Pandora well beyond just the movie."

Cameron noted that, "This is the first time I've really been involved with a game from the inception of the movie project. What they said to us was, 'We want to make a game from inside your thematic ideas, outwards.'"

"Then the thought was, working with Ubisoft, well, wait a minute. We're working in a game engine; you're working in a game engine. Maybe some of the assets we've already generated, of which there are literally tens of thousands, are things you can use. The resounding answer back was, 'Yeah, give us everything you've got'. So we basically did a download of the world to them, and it worked out beautifully. So we figured let's build one world and create two ways of enjoying it, simultaneously: separately and in parallel."

On a wider note, Cameron says that, "Pandora is beautiful and deadly. When you're first introduced, the deadly part is what you see and then as you go deeper the beauty starts to unfold and you realise it's really paradise. It's really the Garden of Eden."

Hmm, so by the sounds of it whatever else happens, the game will be visually pretty impressive. Also, as you'll see if you watch the full thing, Cameron agreed to and amended extensions to Avatar's mythology in the game, meaning that it's all canon and part of the same world. All in all, promising stuff.